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26 July 2015

The Hell Bent Kid

CHARLES
O. LOCKE

Synopsis from Goodreads:
Hailed
by the Western Writers of America as one of the top twenty-five
Westerns ever written: The harrowing story of an innocent young man
pursued across west Texas by a relentless posse.

A
crack shot more skilled with a rifle than are men twice his age,
eighteen-year-old Tot Lohman has no intention of using his genius for
evil. But when a fight erupts at a schoolhouse dance, Lohman is
forced to defend himself, and a young rancher named Shorty Boyd winds
up dead. The Boyds are numerous, powerful, and vicious, and they want
revenge. With no one else to turn to, Lohman sets out across canyon
country to reunite with his ailing father in New Mexico Territory.
The journey will be long, hot, and perilous, and to survive it, this
mild-mannered boy must become the cold-blooded killer he never wanted
to be.

Based
on real events, The Hell Bent Kid is a tale of pursuit as stark and
mesmerizing as the Southwestern landscape in which it is set.
Unrelenting from first page to last, it ranks alongside The Ox-Bow
Incident, True Grit, and The Searchers as one of the most unique and
artful stories of the West ever told. In 1958 it was adapted into the
film From Hell to Texas, directed by the famed Henry Hathaway and
starring Don Murray, Diane Varsi, Chill Wills, and Dennis Hopper.

Stats
for my copy: Kindle edition, Open Road Media, 2015.

How
acquired: NetGalley.

First
line: After the first Indian fighting quieted down, and the
hard-pan camps and towns moved west, killings were less common in
northwest Texas than people were led to think.

My
thoughts: Tot Lohman killed a Boyd in self-defense, and now the
Boyd family is out for revenge, chasing Tot across Texas. This is
Tot's painstaking accounting of his long ride, the people he meets
along the way, the constant stream of Boyds or men hired by the Boyds
to hunt him down. At times it was quite mesmerizing, but those times
were outnumbered by the times it wasn't. Since the majority of the
story is from Tot's POV, we don't get to know any of the characters.
And since Tot is relating the events more like a log of this happened
and then this happened, and not like an actual journal of his
thoughts and feelings, we don't really get to know him either. It
made for a slow read that slogged along at times, but did lead up to
an exciting and climatic ending.

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